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In 2022 we were approached by a client whose job ads weren’t performing as well as they had been in earlier years.
The number of applicants they were producing, and the quality of those candidates was lower. They struggled to fill roles with qualified candidates where in the past they had been flooded with potential employees. After months of struggling along, the client realised they had to have someone from the outside take a look.
Our examination of the situation showed us that several factors played into their dilemma. First, the pandemic changed the way people think about work and how they do it. Second, the unemployment rate in Australia was the lowest it had been in more than 50 years.
And third, their recruitment processes were not doing them any favours.
What works in times of high unemployment stops working in times of low unemployment, because the employer goes from having a position of power – being able to wield their sceptre over the masses and bestow their bounty on one worthy supplicant – to having a position of subjection – almost needing to beg people in the streets to take their job.
While we worked with the client on other aspects of their recruitment process as well, we made quite a few changes to the way their jobs were presented to potential applicants. And while we couldn’t fix the unemployment rate problem, we did help them secure several great team members.
So, what did we do to their job ads?
Job ads, as a whole, have become little more than a laundry list of what the job tasks are and the skills an employer is looking for. Sometimes there is an additional paragraph listing the benefits the employee will receive. But in a tight market, writing a job ad that is the same as everyone else is what’s keeping your responses low.
Instead, we changed it up. We asked ourselves, “How would I market this, if it was a product to be sold?” We worked up several ideal candidate personas, using current marketing methodologies, so when the time came to write and publish the ad, we knew exactly how and where to do that.
Again, straight out of Marketing 101. If you want to reach a certain audience, you need to use words and phrases that are going to speak to them. We used the tactics of appealing to the senses, and creating a story to make our job ad stand out.
The ad commenced with a shot straight to the heart – it asked potential candidates to imagine how they would feel, and then gave them a scenario that engaged all their senses. We know this worked because several of our interviewees commented on how the ad spoke to them.
Previous job ads have listed the benefits a candidate might get, we wove some of them into the narrative, as well as using them as the final hook in the ad – so, once the senses were engaged, we added another layer of positivity to those feelings. On the flip side of this, we also wove in some of the aspects of the position that might appear negative, but we posed them in such a way that they weren’t a negative, they were just a quirk of the job.
In an age of low unemployment, we were looking to engage the interest of not only those people who were actively looking for a new job, but also those who were still in limbo – if they saw our ad and the wonderful job it offered, and they compared it to their existing job, we wanted them to see enough of a difference that they were spurred to action and applied.
It seems to be something that polarises recruiters – should I include information about wages on the job advertisement?
For us, this is a no-brainer. It wastes everyone’s time if applications are received from candidates who, when they discover the wage is lower than they thought, decide to withdraw their application. It reflects badly on the recruitment consultancy and to a candidate it flags two things – First, that the employer isn’t transparent, and second that they are probably cheap.
We were fortunate that our client was paying good wages. However, even if their wage rates were low, it is our job to persuade candidates to apply based on the less tangible benefits to be had. It doesn’t make sense to us to hide the wage rate.
To many employers, especially those in small businesses and blue collar industries, ‘company culture’ sounds like just so much hooey. But a company’s culture is really just a conscious understanding of ‘the way things are done around here’.
Our client’s ads were drawing in candidates based entirely on their skillset, rather than balancing those up with attributes and values. Once we righted that balance, candidates began to appear who more readily matched the company’s culture.
But before we could right the balance, we needed to understand, and get the company’s managers to understand, their own culture. This came from a consultation that dug deep into the company, the values of the managers and management team as a whole, and who they thought would be a good fit for the position they had on offer.
We wanted to make potential candidates start to feel a kind of camaraderie with our client’s company immediately, even from just reading the job ad. We wanted to create a feeling of, “This is a place I would like to work,” and to keep building on that initial feeling across the job ad.
Why did we feel the need to do this? Because one of the problems our client was running into was candidates who ghosted them – where the candidate would put an application in, and then disappear off the face of the planet when the client tried to contact them.
We hoped by developing this feeling of connection with the company that applicants would be predisposed to want to develop more of a relationship with the company, and so when the company contacted them, they were happy to speak with them.
A quirk of the industry we were recruiting for was that many candidates had never needed a resume before – they were either sub-contractors, or had worked for the one employer for most of their careers.
We made it easy for these people to apply – by specifically telling them that a list of the jobs they had been on recently, and some pics of their recent work, would suffice.
With the job market as it is, we had no intention of making the precious few people who were looking for work in our area jump through hoops. We still got the information about the person that we needed, and they didn’t have to stress over this newfangled ‘resume’ thing.
We trialled a few images and found what worked the best was pictures of people happily doing the type of work we were advertising for. We did make one mistake in the beginning and used an image of a couple of young guys with wads of cash in their hands (‘work for us and you’ll make loads of money!!’), but while the ad was amusing, it didn’t perform any where near as well as the ones with people actually working.
In keeping with our new way of advertising jobs, we made sure the ad ended with a call to action – a sentence designed specifically to drive a potential candidate to click the “Apply Now” button.
We recalled the original scenario that appealed to the emotions, and basically said, “Click here if you want to feel like that every day.”
Because the labour market is so short, we decided that we needed to find candidates in places they may not usually be found. We realised that there was a whole contingent of people who hadn’t as yet fully committed to finding a new job, but that were unhappy in their existing job, thinking about a change, or who wanted more hours.
Our ideal candidate personas came in handy here, because they identified where our potential candidates might hang out and where we might find them. We blasted our job ads, not only into existing job boards, but across social media and other paid channels as well.
Without a doubt, we saw more applications once we ran the new ads. Several of the applicants who made it to the interview stage told us they were looking forward to speaking to us about the job, because the ads had piqued their interest. So, we know the ads made an impact.
We still, however, had a lot of applicants who never got back to us when we tried to contact them. The next iteration of those ads will include some psychology around getting the applicants to feel a sense of responsibility over their application, so they feel obliged to communicate with us once their application is made. This would be with the intent of weeding out the timewasters before they even apply.
From our initial thoughts of “How can we promote this job better?” came an entire system of tweaks and changes to better suit job advertising to our current market. We researched recruitment best practice, sales techniques, marketing, psychology, organisational and team behaviours to develop our new way of advertising jobs, which has proven to be successful for our clients.
But advertising the job is only one part of the process. Before that even happened, how did we know what information to get out of our clients? What about interviews and references? And what about making sure the candidates were looked after by the company once we were out of sight?
Working out the most effective ways to do things and working more on building the client/candidate relationship with each interaction is what Staffr is all about. To find out more, give us a call on 1300 318 459 or email us sales@staffr.au
Brisbane’s trusted partner in delivering top-tier labor hire and temporary staffing solutions. We connect businesses with skilled workers across various industries, ensuring you have the right people to drive your success.
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